Home kitchens have long been a center of activity in a household. For example, cooking, eating, drinking, socializing and other group activities often occur in or around the kitchen. As such, kitchen designers have recognized that consumers desire a kitchen which provides features that make the consumers' presence in or around the kitchen more comfortable or pleasing.
Furthermore, due to recent advancements in technology, home appliances are increasingly including “smart” features that are capable of performing intelligent or complex tasks in addition to their traditional functionality.
The challenge then, is to provide advanced appliance features that enhance the natural social atmosphere of the kitchen without burdening the occupants with onerous interaction with the technology.
As an example, consumers may desire to have music playing in the background while kitchen tasks occur or while a group of persons eat or drink together in the kitchen. For example, consumers may desire to allow multiple persons (e.g. guests at a party) to collectively control or contribute to a playlist of music playing at the party.
However, allowing multiple persons to control the playlist can be a complex or time-consuming task. For example, certain existing systems may require each guest to operate the host's audio equipment. For guests that have never interacted with such equipment this can be confusing and require instruction, distracting the host from entertaining the other guests.
As another example, certain existing systems may allow various persons to interact with the host's audio equipment using their own respective devices (e.g. tablets or smartphones). However, such systems may require each guest to log-on to the home owner's home wireless network. Therefore, manual entry of a network name and password is likely required. Manual entry of network information can be time consuming, tedious, and prone to error. In addition, for certain hosts it may be undesirable to allow guests to access their home network.
Therefore, a need exists for appliance systems providing user-friendly shared music playlist editing and playback.